Garden City's Ava Nat wins her Knockout Round on 'The Voice,' moves on to playoffs

With an emotional resonance far beyond her 18 years, Garden City singer Ava Nat performed Olivia Newton-John’s poignant “Hopelessly Devoted to You” on the NBC singing competition “The Voice” Monday night to win her Knockout Round and proceed to the playoffs.

“Ava, you told the story so beautifully,” said her coach, singer Niall Horan, as he gave her the win over her 20-year-old teammate Sadie Dahl, of Draper, Utah. In an insert speaking to the camera, he went on to explain, “Ava is the most consistent one we have on this show. Every time she comes out and she gives a shatterproof performance. Her ability to tell a story is insane.”

“It's like I almost blacked out onstage,” Nat — née Ava Natalie Milone, a 2024 Garden City High School graduate and now a freshman at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee — told Newsday Tuesday. “I was just kind of, like, so into it that I don't even remember what happened after. I asked my mom,” attorney Christina Milone, “ ‘What did they say, what did I even do?’ ”

Nat and Dahl appeared in the final segment of the two-hour show, beginning with a rehearsal with Horan and Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Joe Walsh, serving as a guest “mega mentor.”

Singer-guitarist Walsh told the two, “Well, I did some homework and I think you’re both brilliant” — causing a happily astonished look on Nat’s face. In response to a nervous Nat asking how he got ready for his own first big performance decades ago, Walsh advised her: “Turn your mind off. ... All those voices saying, ‘We need to talk.’ Turn those off. Just be you.”

Nat heeded his words, she said, along with dovetailing advice from the show’s vocal coach assigned to her. “She says to really stay in the moment of what you're singing. ... If your eyes are wandering, you can tell you’re thinking” rather than singing with a clear head and emotions — “being able to stay in there and not be, like, ‘Oh, no, I’m worried about this next high note’ rather than feeling what I'm saying lyrically.”

In the rehearsal segment, Nat had told Horan and Walsh she chose “Hopelessly Devoted to You” — written by John Farrar for the 1978 movie version of the 1972 Jim Jacobs-Warren Casey Broadway hit — because, “I think it’s a really powerful song. Super fun to sing, too. This song reminds me of sitting on the couch, watching ‘Grease’ for the first time with my family. My mom, this is, like, her go-to karaoke song.”

In the musical, the song is that of a teenager in the throes of first love, yet it's simultaneously about the more grown-up feeling of lasting devotion. Nat said she was able to conjure that mature-adult emotion by thinking of her late sister, Sabrina, a student at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, who died in June 2019 at age 21 in a single-car accident in Massachusetts.

“It was something I was channeling,” Nat said. “I prayed about it and I really was speaking to my sister and was, like, ‘I really want to perform this for you and have you feel like you're in that audience and you're on that stage with me.’ And that energy that she had is the only way I could describe the energy I had onstage. ... It was like I was in another world, and it felt very out-of-body-fever-dreamy.”

The season 28 “Voice” Playoffs begin Dec. 1 and the live finales will air Dec. 15 and 16.